The Clydach Murders E-Book

John Morris

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 470

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Is Dai Morris a brutal murderer or the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice? Author and former solicitor John Morris investigates the Clydach murders, which occurred in 1999, for which Dai Morris was convicted in 2006. In a case which shocked the country Mandy Power, her bed-ridden mother and her two young daughters were battered to death. The crime sparked a huge investigation yet the police made little progress. This widely researched book contends that Morris, convicted for the murders in 2006, is a scapegoat, an innocent man against whom justice was miscarried. No forensic evidence or DNA connected him to the crime; he was convicted because he lacked of a solid alibi, because his gold chain was found in Power's house and because, as a man with a criminal record, he initially lied to the police. Morris's case is to be heard in the Court of Appeal, probably in 2018, in the light of new evidence, including DNA testing and falsification of police documents. South Wales Police was notorious in the period 1980 to 2010 for false convictions on fabricated evidence. Significantly, previous suspects for the Clydach murders include former police officers, one of whom was having a lesbian affair with Mandy Power. There is every possibility that Dai Morris has suffered a miscarriage of justice. The author studied the police files and court papers, and discussed the case with key witnesses and experts. He is convinced that Morris is the victim of a conspiracy to falsely convict. The brutal murder of an entire family is a horrible thing but to compound it with an unsafe conviction shows a disrespect to the victims, to their relatives, to the family of Dai Morris and to the law. This new edition includes a short Postcript of new evidence generated by the original book, which casts even further doubt on the safety of the conviction of Dai Morris.

Leseprobe

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

Twitter: @SerenBooks

© John Morris, 2019.

First published in 2017.

The right of John Morris to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

ISBN – 978-1-78172-529-0

Ebook – 978-1-78172-530-6

Kindle – 978-1-78172-531-3

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council

Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors

openstreetmap.org

Printed in Plantin Light by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow.

Contents

Prologue

Part I

The murders at 9 Kelvin Road and the flawed police investigation that followed

Part II

The 2002 trial of David George (Dai) Morris at Swansea Crown Court

Part III

The 2006 trial of David George (Dai) Morris at Newport Crown Court

Epilogue

Postscript

Chronology of key events

Appendix

Acknowledgements

‘The house [at 9 Kelvin Road] was cleansed by one who was forensically aware.’

– Mr Justice Butterfield,

Swansea Crown Court, 24-27 June 2002during the course of his summing up

Prologue

It was a crime that shocked the nation. During the early hours of Sunday 27 June 1999, three generations of one family, all female, living together in the village of Clydach in the lower Swansea Valley, were killed in a series of vicious attacks. Two years later, Mr Justice Butterfield, presiding over the trial of David George (‘Dai’) Morris, a builder’s labourer and known petty criminal, described the atrocity as ‘a murder of exceptional savagery’. Patrick Harrington QC, prosecuting counsel, described it as a ‘massacre’, and an ‘orgy of savagery’.

Divorced mother of two Mandy Power (aged 34), her disabled and bed-ridden mother, Doris Dawson (80), and Mandy’s daughters, Katie (10) and Emily (8), were brutally bludgeoned to death by a calculating assailant wielding a heavy four-foot fibreglass pole.

It was a killing on a scale previously unknown in Wales. It was the most horrific in regard to the violence inflicted on the victims; it resulted in the biggest murder investigation ever carried out by South Wales Police, involving over fifty detectives working full-time for almost three years; and it was by far the most expensive investigation in Wales up to that time, at a final cost of well over £6 million.

But despite the extensive publicity, the immense effort, the huge cost and time involved in bringing the case to trial, many consider that the truth of what really happened on that terrible Sunday morning has yet to be revealed. Moreover, justice may have miscarried and the man who was convicted of the murders might indeed be innocent. Neither his DNA nor his fingerprints could be found at the murder scene; the story told by the police was that he had wiped them all away. Furthermore, in order to destroy all potential remaining evidence, four fires were started in the house with the intention of razing it to the ground, thus obliterating all traces of the dreadful act.

However, owing to the presence of mind of a neighbour, that obliteration did not take place. Within minutes of smoke being seen rising from the back of 9 Kelvin Road, the emergency services were called. Morriston and Pontardawe Fire Services responded to what they assumed was an ordinary domestic fire, arriving at the now blazing house within just eight minutes of being alerted. Wearing breathing apparatus, firemen forced their way inside, even before the fire was brought fully under control, to search for anyone who might be trapped in the house.

One of the firemen, Neil MacPherson, brought out the first of the four occupants, ten-year-old Katie. She was laid on the ground where he tried to resuscitate her, but it was too late. Two more bodies were then brought out: another daughter, eight-year-old Emily, followed by the girls’ mother, Mandy Power. They too were dead. The body of an elderly woman, Doris Dawson, Mandy Power’s mother, was found in her bed.

What horrified the firemen was that none of the victims had been killed by smoke, by the fire or by accident. All had died as a result of extreme violence. Number 9 Kelvin Road was a crime scene, the address of one of the most shocking murders ever committed in Wales.

Then began the biggest murder hunt in Welsh history, and what also may be the greatest miscarriage of justice in Wales. The events that followed this terrible tragedy culminated in what can only be described as a travesty of justice.

As the police investigation progressed, integrity and the rule of law gave way to a fierce determination on the part of South Wales Police to protect their own. It appears that they were anxious to find a suitable suspect, frame him, and obtain a conviction at any cost. In 2001, 21 months after the crime, the police charged builder’s labourer David George (Dai) Morris with the murders. Morris was convicted essentially on the basis of a single piece of evidence – his broken gold neck-chain, partially covered in blood, which was found at the crime scene. His litany of lies, lack of an alibi for the night in question and his previous criminal record formed a case for the prosecution based more on speculation than on hard fact. In 2002 at the Swansea Crown Court he was found guilty of the murders, and at his second trial in 2006 at the Newport Crown Court, Morris was again found guilty of the murders, and sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment.

This is the story of an appalling crime and the flawed police investigation that followed. It is based mainly on first-hand reports from the South Wales Evening Post, which kindly opened its archives to me, and recollections of witnesses who gave evidence at the Swansea and Newport Crown Courts. It also includes the memories of people who were not called to give evidence at either of the trials, but nevertheless had something important to say. It is the account of a major injustice and what happens when one of the greatest legal systems in the world is manipulated by the unscrupulous, in order to achieve a court finding that is entirely inconsistent with the justice it seeks to deliver and endeavours to uphold.

Part I

The murders at 9 Kelvin Road and the flawed police investigation that followed

1. 9 Kelvin Road, Clydach – home of Mandy Power and her family

2. Rhyddwen Road, Craig Cefn Parc – home of Dai Morris and Mandy Jewell

3. New Inn Pub

4. West Crossways, Pontardawe – home of Alison and Stephen Lewis

5. Morriston Police Station

6. Morriston Fire Station

7. Cockett Police Station

8. Coedwig Place, Gendros, Swansea – home of Dai Morris’ parents

9. The White Chapel

10. Treboeth

Chapter 1

It was 12.30 a.m. on a warm but rainy summer night. A minibus taxi stopped on a neon-lit road in a quiet Welsh village. An attractive female passenger and two small girls got out and climbed the short flight of steps leading to the front door of an ordinary suburban semi. The driver watched as the woman turned the key in the lock before she and the girls slipped inside, closing the door behind them. Almost three years afterwards, recalling aloud his thoughts at that moment for the benefit of a jury, the taxi driver said: ‘They’re safe now.’

Four hours later, at 4.27 a.m. on Sunday 27 June 1999 the Emergency Control Centre in Newport received a 999 call. It was the first of several urgent calls the Centre was to receive that night from an area north of Swansea. The message was immediately relayed to the South Wales Fire Service headquarters in Carmarthen which, in turn, notified the two fire stations nearest to the location of the alarm. ‘Red Watch’ fire crews at Morriston and Pontardawe, two small industrial towns to the north of Swansea, were instantly alerted to the emergency by a loud bell, a flashing red light and a fax message which spewed out simultaneously in the two fire stations.

The 999 call came from the Sunnybank district of Clydach, a sprawling village situated on the western slopes of the lower Swansea Valley. Minutes before, at 4.20 a.m. Robert Wachowski, a BP chemical worker, had looked out of his bedroom window after hearing banging and smashing noises coming from 9 Kelvin Road, the house almost directly opposite his home. His first thoughts were that someone was tampering with cars in the street but then, in the half-light, he saw clouds of white smoke billowing from the rear of the house. He wondered if someone had set fire to a bag of rubbish and rang the occupant of number 9, Mandy Power, on her landline. When she failed to answer, he tried her mobile number, but again got no reply. Wachowski dressed quickly, ran across the road, banged on the front door of the threatened house and shouted for Mandy to wake up. He then ran around to the back of the house, where he found that the kitchen was blazing fiercely.

Donald Jones, another neighbour, was woken by his mother, who ran screaming into his bedroom. He rushed out to help Wachowski. Together the two men hammered on the front door and windows and shouted warnings as they desperately tried to rescue the family they believed were trapped inside. As they attempted to force open the front door, they were beaten back by thick smoke. Running to the back of the house, they found the french doors swinging open, the double-glazed windows shattered and the window frames buckled by the intense heat. Again they were beaten back, this time by a wall of flames. Wachowski recalled later: ‘I looked up at Katie and Emily’s room and thought, “I hope they’re not in there.”’ Desperate to help, he shouted to Rosemary Jones, who lived opposite number 9, asking her to ring for the fire service. Moments later a powerful Dennis fire engine, one of two on permanent standby at Morriston Fire Station, was on its way, and a fire support Land Rover followed closely behind.

Number 9 Kelvin Road, a semi-detached three-bedroom house, was built around the mid-1950s. It is one of about sixty houses, all of a similar style, rising on either side of Kelvin Road, between Gellionnen Road to the east and Tan Yr Allt Road to the west, at one point intersected by Carlton Road. The house occupies a slightly elevated site on the north side of the road. Six stone steps rising from the pavement meet a short path dividing a small patchy lawn fenced by low wrought-iron railings. From there it takes just three paces to reach the front door. A path on the right leads round the side of the house to the back garden.

During their journey, the fire crew maintained radio contact with South Wales Fire Service in Carmarthen. The crew assumed that they would be dealing with a straightforward house fire, but John Campbell, the commanding officer, was prepared for anything, or so he thought. Headquarters had received conflicting reports as to whether the occupants of the burning house were still inside, and no one knew for certain whether or not they would be looking for survivors. Shortly before the fire engine arrived, controllers confirmed that there was at least one person in the house.

Off-duty firefighter Adrian Humphries was the first emergency services worker to arrive at the scene. He lived in Kelvin Road, just a few doors away, and was dozing in his armchair when his wife shook him awake to tell him about the fire. He rushed to the burning house and asked if anyone was inside. Someone said, ‘No, she’s out.’

As the Morriston fire engine turned into Kelvin Road, crew member Neil MacPherson and his team strapped on self-contained breathing apparatus. He readied himself to lead the search for the people trapped inside the house. He and John Campbell were both 30-year veterans, with extensive experience of house fires, road traffic accidents and numerous other fire-related incidents. Up to that night, they thought they had seen it all.

Even before the fire engine came to a complete halt, Campbell had issued his orders. Onlookers moved aside and the crew saw for themselves that the house was well and truly ablaze. Campbell instructed MacPherson to lead a search for casualties or trapped individuals. Floodlights were turned on and directed towards the house while oxygen cylinders were prepared in anticipation of resuscitating survivors affected by smoke inhalation. Within seconds of the Morriston crew’s arrival, a second fire engine, from Pontardawe, pulled up at the house. Now, ten firefighters were involved, plus those who had travelled separately in the Morriston support Land Rover.

Robert Wachowski told the firemen that the stairs were on the right, just inside the front door, then retreated to a safe distance where he and his other neighbours watched as the dreadful events unfolded. MacPherson, wearing a fire protection suit, was the first of a two-man team to force his way into the blazing house, kicking in the front door as he went. Fire officers Spencer Lewis, Huw Thomas and Peter Bringloe followed closely behind. Battling through the flames and thick blinding smoke, they felt their way upstairs on their hands and knees, their noses just inches from the stair carpet.

As they reached the landing, one of the firemen swept the floor with a gloved hand and discovered the first body. MacPherson gathered up a limp little girl whom he described as ‘light and small’. She was blackened by smoke. He carried her downstairs and out through the front door. As John Campbell went to help him, vomit spewed from the child’s mouth over the front of Campbell’s jacket, giving him the impression that she was still alive. They passed the child to Adrian Humphries, and together helped him lay her on the grass where MacPherson tried to resuscitate her.

Huw Thomas, a fireman from Pontardawe, found another small child upstairs as he felt his way on his hands and knees through the dense smoke. She too was carried downstairs and passed to Humphries. He later described the child as ‘very grey-looking’. Then the firemen brought out a third body: a dark-haired young woman. Smoke had blackened her entire naked body and, oddly, a pink vibrator was lodged in her vagina.

All three bodies were laid on the ground and covered with blankets, leaving only their heads exposed. For several long minutes the firemen tried to revive them. While MacPherson continued working on the first little girl, Humphries worked on the second. MacPherson applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Certain that he detected a heartbeat, he tried hard to coax a response from her.

At 4.41 a.m. a team of paramedics arrived and took over the medical care of the victims. Paramedic Eric Thomas ran to the three victims the firefighters were trying to revive. He helped those working on the young woman who, he saw, had an injury to the side of her face. He would say later that ‘there was always a chance that she was alive, but, given the extent of her injuries, we decided then it was a lost cause and we stopped.’ Clearly Mandy Power was dead.

Thomas’ colleague, ambulance technician Barry Pierpoint, who had also tried to resuscitate one of the children at the scene, would later say that ‘it was quite obvious that very serious injuries had been sustained’. He observed that the fire officers appeared to be ‘quite shocked and distressed’ by the condition of the three bodies.

The paramedics were unable to properly fit oxygen masks on the faces of the little girls. One of the paramedics noted that neither of them appeared to be breathing, and both had sustained extensive head injuries. Another paramedic said to Neil MacPherson, who was still trying to revive one of the girls, later identified as Katie Power: ‘You’re going to have to stop. I’m afraid they’ve all gone.’ As MacPherson pulled his gloved hand away from the back of the child’s head, he saw that it was covered in blood.

The firemen quickly realised that the injuries could not have been caused by the fire. Given their extent and nature, it was obvious that they had been deliberately inflicted. All efforts to revive the victims using first aid and oxygen ceased, and the medical team packed away their equipment and left.

MacPherson re-entered the burning house to search for more casualties. By now the fire was under control and the smoke was less dense. In an upstairs back bedroom, he found the dead body of an elderly woman still in bed. She too had sustained terrible facial and head injuries and was covered in blood. Leaving her where she lay, he retreated from the bedroom. On the landing he saw flesh, pieces of bone and pools of blood. Looking into the bathroom, he saw a bath, partially filled with water which contained more blood. Descending the stairs, he saw that the walls, doors and ceilings were also spattered with blood. He said later: ‘I had never seen anything like this in one incident.’

It was clear that 9 Kelvin Road was a crime scene. It was a startling development, but fire crews often find themselves in unusual situations and have either been trained, or have learned, to deal with most of them. A short coded message was sent to the South Wales Fire Service: a dead body had been found. Code is used to prevent amateur radio enthusiasts from intruding into emergency services’ wavebands to pick up and disperse sensitive information before the authorities might wish it to be released. The same code is used regardless of the number of deaths. The message does not state the cause of death, so the emergency services operatives who receive it have no way of knowing the number of bodies found, or whether death was the result of an accident or foul play. Despite having alerted their colleagues to the loss of life, only the personnel on the scene were aware of the extent or cause of the shocking discoveries.

The fire crew was simply not trained or properly equipped to deal with a crime of this magnitude. When Police Constable Alison Crewe, an Acting Sergeant, arrived at Kelvin Road, she immediately realised the seriousness of the situation, and radioed her senior officer, Detective Inspector Stuart Lewis, who was also on duty that night, telling him he was urgently required. Lewis was an experienced police officer and had been a member of the South Wales Police Force for more than twenty years. He had investigated numerous serious crimes, including two murders that had resulted in convictions.

When Detective Inspector Lewis arrived at Kelvin Road, his seniority effectively placed him in charge of the crime scene. John Campbell, Eric Thomas and shortly afterwards Alison Crewe all told him that the victims had not died as a result of the fire but from injuries inflicted on them. Three of the bodies were still laid out on the lawn in front of the house, and Lewis could see this for himself. This was a multiple murder and demanded the highest level of priority and immediate action. But the house was still on fire and the crime scene was overrun by firemen whose primary concern was to make it safe and minimise risk, rather than to preserve evidence for use in any future criminal proceedings.

However, Detective Inspector Lewis knew full well the steps needed to be taken in a situation such as this: taking command, restricting access to the crime scene and preserving evidence so that the criminal investigation could begin promptly. He also knew that everything had to be done strictly by the book, otherwise valuable time might be wasted, important clues missed and even vital evidence contaminated and rendered useless for legal purposes, or even lost for ever. But to this day, for reasons known only to himself, Lewis took none of these steps and, instead, quickly removed himself from the scene.

Chapter 2

Between 1980 and 2000 South Wales Police gave an entirely new meaning to the expression ‘trial and error’. Of all the police forces in Britain, South Wales Police has been responsible for some of the worst miscarriages of justice in the United Kingdom. By the time of the Clydach murders, no fewer than nine earlier murders investigated by the force had proved to be miscarriages of justice, and nineteen people had been freed after being wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit. Had their trials been conducted before 1967, when the death penalty was abolished, those individuals would have been hanged.

In order to prove that a miscarriage of justice has taken place and to ensure that a conviction is quashed, new exculpatory evidence, which was not available at the trial, is required to show that the original conviction was unsafe. Alternatively, there must be proof of error by the trial judge, by the prosecution lawyers, or by the convicted person’s defence team, or proof of corruption on the part of the police who had investigated the case. The waiting list for review is at least two years long, during which time the convicted person will remain in prison.

Many miscarriages of justice were caused by wrongdoing on the part of South Wales Police detectives. Evidence was routinely altered and fabricated. In some cases, detectives wrote statements themselves and then forced suspects or witnesses to sign them. In other cases, suspects were tortured, bullied or simply worn down by lengthy interviews into making untrue confessions. Vulnerable witnesses were ‘leaned on’ to make false statements implicating an innocent person in a crime; others were bribed, some intimidated. Prisoners serving time in jail were offered deals in return for signing false statements, and some detectives planted incriminating evidence where it was certain to be found, to frame innocent suspects for crimes they had not committed.

The practice of writing up notebooks at a later date than claimed – producing non-contemporaneous accounts of events – was exposed following the application of a modern forensic technique called Electro Static Detection Analysis (ESDA). Officers habitually wrote up their notebooks at a later time than they claimed. This is illegal and is also a disciplinary matter, but this unlawful practice nevertheless persisted as a simple means of obtaining evidence in order to achieve convictions.

In many cases later set aside by the Court of Appeal, ESDA testing proved that some officers lied about the times and dates when statements had been written. Often the statements were prepared only after officers had compared notes and colluded with their colleagues. This could be ascertained because forensic analysis revealed what had been written on pages below the page the statements were written on in the officers’ notebooks, which included information that gave away what the officers had been doing.

In June 1999, two weeks before the Clydach murders, South Wales Police hit the national headlines when human rights lawyers and civil rights campaigners accused the force of ‘corruption and incompetence on a massive scale’. They revealed that many of the murder cases the force had investigated over two decades were fundamentally flawed and were among the worst miscarriages of justice ever seen in Britain. The headline in the Daily Express on 13 June 1999 read: ‘SHAME OF FORCE THAT DECIDED IT WAS ABOVE THE LAW’. The editorial outlined a number of cases in which South Wales Police detectives ignored both the legal and human rights of suspects in order to obtain convictions that were later revealed to be unsafe. A year later, the situation had not improved, and South Wales Police continued to tolerate illegal practices within its ranks in order to keep conviction rates high. A headline in The Observer on 15 October 2000 stated: ‘CORRUPT FORCE IN FIRING LINE sic: PRESSURE GROWS FOR SOUTH WALES POLICE TO FACE INQUIRY OVER MISCONDUCT AND WRONGFUL IMPRISONMENTS’. But even though deep general concern and dissatisfaction persisted over the manner in which South Wales Police conducted many of its investigations, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was reluctant to agree to demands for a review.

Despite the pressure generated by the media, no inquiry was ever launched, although one was badly needed. There was little political will by the sitting Labour government to undermine the work carried out by South Wales Police, no matter how unlawful and insidious its practices were revealed to be. Bernard de Maid, a highly regarded criminal lawyer who represented two of the three defendants wrongfully convicted of the 1988 murder of Cardiff prostitute Lynette White, said: ‘There has been, over the years, a corrupt clique of South Wales Police officers who have been responsible for various miscarriages of justice.’ Satish Sekar, investigative author and civil rights campaigner, said: ‘They [South Wales Police detectives] seem to decide who is guilty and then seek evidence to fit that scenario instead of allowing the evidence to lead them to the guilty.’ Commenting on the Lynette White murder case in 2011, Sekar said: ‘Innocent men were put behind bars following the murder…. The system is a disgrace.’

Between 1980 and 2000, thirty South Wales Police officers were temporarily suspended from duty as a result of using illegal and unacceptable investigative practices, but even where criminal charges were brought against them, no convictions resulted. Some officers were allowed to take early retirement on full pension, despite a catalogue of complaints recorded against them.

In one of these cases, it was shown that a senior detective had verbally and physically bullied suspects and vulnerable witnesses into making and signing untrue statements. In another case the same officer had handcuffed a male suspect to a hot radiator in order to force a confession from him. Other confessions were shown to have been fabricated, evidence vital to the defence team was not disclosed and notebooks and records were altered and lost.

All this is not to say that the entire corpus of the South Wales Police Force was corrupt. Of course it was not. But it is a recorded fact that the South Wales Police Force was responsible for more miscarriages of justice during this twenty-year period than any other police force in the UK. Those miscarriages of justice and the resulting wrongful imprisonments were the responsibility of a relatively small number of police detectives, but it was those few corrupt officers who were the root cause of the problem, and their wrongdoings tainted the force. Notable miscarriages of justice involving South Wales Police included the Darvell Brothers, the Cardiff Three, and the case of Jonathan Jones. A full list is included in the Appendix to this book.

All the miscarriages of justice for which the South Wales Police force was solely responsible were characterised by the same elements: dishonesty on the part of the responsible detectives, their rejection of a suspect’s basic human and legal rights, and a determination to obtain a conviction at the cost of truth and justice. If framing an innocent person by police officers sworn to uphold the law was not bad enough, another custom that flourished within the ranks of South Wales Police was equally corrupt. This was the sinister practice of watching one another’s backs. It ensured that a fellow police officer would escape the consequences of wrongdoing, no matter how serious the misconduct or criminal their actions might be.

Of all the miscarriages of justice set aside by the Court of Appeal, few were more shocking than the case of Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris, known collectively as the ‘Cardiff Three’. In 1988 they were framed for the brutal stabbing to death of Cardiff prostitute Lynette White, and sentenced to life imprisonment. It took eleven years for the case to be brought before the Court of Appeal when, in 1999, eight police officers were shown to have acted wrongfully during the murder investigation, and the Cardiff Three were set free. The responsible police officers were arrested and charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Some were charged with perjury. Despite the damning evidence against them, they all pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The reason why the police officers were so confident in their pleas soon became abundantly clear. Chief Superintendent Chris Coutts, an experienced police officer, was placed in charge of the investigation, and yet before their trial had even started, two sets of paperwork, vital to the prosecution case, went missing. The trial ended there and then, with formal verdicts of not guilty and all eight police officers walking free from court.

The following year, the missing documents miraculously reappeared. They had not been destroyed after all, but by that time it was too late. The case had been thrown out and the suspects could not be retried. On 16 July 2013 reports released by the Independent Police Commission and HM Crown Prosecution Inspectorate revealed a failure by the police and prosecution to control their files. It was justice denied to the Cardiff Three.

Meanwhile, during the same year, there was a growing clamour from all parties in the Welsh Assembly to formally ask the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, to launch a public inquiry into the activities of the South Wales Police. If granted, the potential consequences would be enormous. A public inquiry into so many miscarriages of justice would inevitably lead to questioning ministers in Parliament and loss of confidence in the Chief Constable of the South Wales Police and his force. Reputations would be shattered and careers ruined. It would be a crisis of monumental proportions from which it might take decades for the police force to recover. For all these reasons, the South Wales Police, under the leadership of Chief Constable Sir Anthony Burden, and on the brink of a new murder investigation in the aftermath of the Clydach house fire, was determined to avoid yet another miscarriage of justice. Their stated intention was to conduct this murder hunt properly, effectively and strictly by the book.

Speaking early on in the Clydach murder investigation, Detective Chief Superintendent Wynne Phillips, head of South Wales CID, put his reputation on the line when he vowed: ‘I am determined that in the event of a trial there must be no appeal against a guilty verdict as a result of what we have, or have not done…. If there is, it must only be on legal grounds.’

But the investigation was doomed before it started. Corruption and systematic wrongdoing by officers in the South Wales Police, determined to get a conviction at any cost, were endemic and too deeply rooted. Furthermore, the consequences for any officer found guilty of misconduct were not onerous. Internal enquiries by officers investigating their own colleagues usually ended with no sanctions imposed. Court hearings were sabotaged, leaving guilty officers to walk free. Punishments or written warnings were of little or no deterrence. At the time of the Clydach murders, officers in the South Wales Police force had little to fear if they were caught out.

Detectives in the South Wales Police were not above the law, but they knew how the criminal justice system could be manipu-lated. Furthermore, they knew they could rely on their colleagues to support them. They were poachers turned gamekeepers, able to both commit crimes and to get away with them.

Chapter 3

When night-duty police officers at the Kelvin Road crime scene ended their shift at 6 a.m. on that fateful June Sunday morning, they made their way to police headquarters in Cockett, Swansea. On their arrival some 30 minutes or so later, they promptly handed in their reports to the duty officer. Only then, about two hours after the crime had first come to light, did South Wales Police realise that they were dealing with a serious crime. Valuable time had been lost, and there followed a frantic scramble to action as word of the murders quickly spread and the detectives on duty prepared themselves to deal with the situation.

In the event of a serious incident, such as rape or murder, weekend emergency cover was provided by senior detectives on a rota basis. On the weekend of 26/27 June, cover was provided by Detective Superintendent Martyn Lloyd-Evans, so the Clydach murders file landed on his desk. Second in command was veteran officer Deputy Detective Chief Inspector Chris Coutts, who, more than a decade earlier, had headed the disastrous Lynette White murder investigation.

Martyn Lloyd-Evans had been a police officer for almost thirty years. He had spent most of his career in the South Wales Police working as a detective inspector in Caerphilly and Cardiff. In the mid-1980s he worked with the Regional Crime Squad. For the eight years leading up to the Kelvin Road murders he had worked with the Major Crime Support Unit (MCSU), the police unit responsible for investigating serious crime. In his long career, Lloyd-Evans had been involved in more than 50 murder investigations. Even so, when he witnessed the extent of crimes inside 9 Kelvin Road, he was reduced to tears.

As soon as reinforcements arrived, the crime scene at 9 Kelvin Road was secured and a murder investigation began. By 7 a.m. Police Surgeon Carl Harry had arrived to examine the victims for signs of life. Three smoke-stained bodies remained under blankets at the front of the house, while a fourth was in bed in a back bedroom of the house. The fire had been brought under control and the flames extinguished. The interior of the house and the outside walls above the windows of the rooms where the fire had burned were blackened by smoke. Throughout the house a thick layer of dark-grey ash had settled on every horizontal surface.

After examination, Mr Harry pronounced the victims dead. He then estimated the times of their deaths based on a formula by which the rate of body cooling is calculated, and the extent of rigor mortis. Later the bodies were removed to Morriston Hospital mortuary where full pathological examinations would be carried out over the next few days. Carl Harry’s report would record in brief terms the injuries the victims had sustained, which, in his opinion, had caused their deaths. For all four victims his note recorded the same comment: ‘The indications were of traumatic injuries being sustained prior to or around the time of death.’

As the Morriston and Pontardawe fire services rolled up their hoses, packed away their equipment and checked off their marker-pen tally to ensure that all the firefighters were accounted for, Dr Deryk James, a Home Office forensic pathologist, and two forensic scientists arrived at Kelvin Road to begin their investigations. Dr James confirmed Mr Harry’s findings, recording the ‘obvious blunt head injuries’ sustained by all the deceased. He also noted the end of a pink vibrator protruding from Mandy Power’s vagina.

Local journalists who had thought they were turning up to a house fire in Clydach found themselves reporting a multiple murder. The families of the victims were quickly traced and informed of the deaths. Michael Power, Mandy Power’s former husband and Katie and Emily’s father, was visited by police at Eynon’s bakery in Pontardawe. He had been at home with his new partner, Sara Williams, at the time of the killings. Distraught, he could provide no explanation for the attack, nor, he told detectives, was he aware of any threats made against his former wife. His pain was so immense that he was unable to speak publicly for a month. When at last he did, he said: ‘I have lost Katie and Emily, the two most important people in my life.’ He then made an emotional appeal, on behalf of the police, to find the killer: ‘These children could have been your children and I ask people to think about this and come forward to the inquiry team with any information you may have.’

Mandy’s three older married sisters, Margaret Jewell, Julie Evans and Sandra Jones, and her brother, Robert Dawson, were also overcome with grief when they learned of the tragic deaths. Speaking on behalf of the family, Mandy Power’s brother-in-law Peter Jewell said that they were struggling with their loss, but were confident that the police would catch the killer. ‘We want the person behind bars. We will never get over our loss, but it will mean someone is off the streets.’

On the day after the murders, a press conference was called at Cockett Police Station headquarters at which news of the crime was announced to a packed assembly of journalists. A broadcast was made on national television, and an appeal called for witnesses to come forward. Speaking on behalf of South Wales Police, Detective Superintendent Lloyd-Evans said: ‘Amanda, a devoted mother, came home with her two children at 12.30 a.m., I need to know what happened after that. Three generations of a family have died and a family has been devastated by this appalling crime. They have been brutally attacked and it is important that we get to the bottom of this as soon as possible.’

It was the worst multiple murder in the history of Wales and there was no obvious motive, but Lloyd-Evans managed to convey the impression that all was well in his investigation. From the clues he believed must have been left in the house, he was confident the police would have the killer in custody by nightfall. In reality, Lloyd-Evans and his team were feeling anything but confident.

Detective Inspector Stuart Lewis, the first senior police officer to turn up at 9 Kelvin Road and who had de facto control of the crime scene, had seen the horrifically injured bodies of the victims and knew they had been murdered. His rank placed a responsibility on him to take control of the situation and follow a strict protocol of preserving the crime scene against loss, contamination or damage, and reporting the situation to senior officers and the control, thus setting a murder inquiry in motion. Furthermore, he was expected to remain at the scene of the crime until reinforcements arrived. It was vital to follow proper procedures if the police were to stand the best chance of catching the murderer quickly. And for reasons that soon became clear, Stuart Lewis should have contacted his superiors in order to have himself removed from the case.

But instead, within minutes of being informed by John Campbell, Eric Thomas and police officer Alison Crewe that the victims had died as a result of the injuries inflicted on them and not from the fire, Stuart Lewis hurriedly abandoned the scene of these horrific murders. Estimates by witnesses of the time Lewis remained in Kelvin Road range from five to fifteen minutes. He gave no plausible explanation as to why he was leaving, nor did he organise a senior police officer to replace him. It was a gross dereliction of duty and a serious disciplinary offence.

The crime scene and all operational procedures were consequently left to Police Constable Alison Crewe, then an Acting Sergeant, who had summoned Lewis to the scene in the first place. Also on duty at this time was Constable David Williams, who had accompanied Crewe to Kelvin Road. In an understatement of monumental proportions, Crewe said later: ‘I was surprised he [Detective Inspector Lewis] left the scene so suddenly.’

Fifty officers were quickly assigned to the case and began their hunt for a killer. While the trail had not yet gone cold, it had certainly cooled, and some of the detectives were annoyed about the unnecessary delay. At this point they cast around for someone else to take the blame, and their eyes quickly settled on a likely candidate. The police accused fire officers of trampling all over the crime scene, removing three of the bodies and failing to preserve evidence which, they said, amounted to gross negligence on the part of the fire service. This was both untrue and unfair. The first duty of the firemen was to preserve life, followed closely by their second duty, which was to bring the fire under control. Preserving evidence was not their immediate responsibility: that was a job for the police. In any event, the firemen had informed Detective Inspector Stuart Lewis of the crime, so if valuable evidence was lost or damaged as a result of delay, the police had no one to blame but their own.

In the internal disciplinary inquiry that followed, Stuart Lewis gave no explanation for his abrupt departure from the crime scene, nor did he clarify why he had failed to report the murders to his superior officers. The account he eventually gave at a disciplinary hearing which followed the inquiry was considered to be untrue. ESDA testing proved that Stuart Lewis’ account of the incident, which he recorded in his notebook, was written two days after the event and, even then, some of it had been altered. These questions remain unanswered to this day. It was, and still is, a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs.

What is known for certain is that when Stuart Lewis returned to Morriston Police Station, he reported the fire to a superior officer but, incredibly, not the murders. In the police station, he made a lengthy private telephone call and was seen feeding numerous coins into a payphone that was located in the public waiting area. Police Constable Geraint Usher, who had accompanied Lewis from Clydach to the police station, observed Lewis on the telephone talking about events in Kelvin Road to a person who was never identified.

Why did Stuart Lewis use a payphone in a public area of the station to make his call when he had a private phone in his office? The telephone in his office would have logged his call; the payphone did not. It was the only phone in the building that he could have used if he did not want his call to be traced. Even though all this activity took place during his work shift, Lewis never divulged the identity of the person to whom he had spoken. Neither would he say what they had discussed.

It later emerged that these were not the only occasions that Stuart Lewis had behaved oddly that day. When his shift ended later that morning, he returned to his home in Pontardawe, showered and went to bed. He mentioned nothing about the murders to his partner, even though he was aware that the victims were well known to his brother and sister-in-law. She found out about the murders only when two police officers called at their home during the afternoon to speak with him about the crime. But even more crucially, Lewis was found to have been absent from his police station office between midnight and 3 a.m. – the very time when the murders were believed to have been committed. His unmarked red Peugeot police car was also missing from the police station’s car park. He was on duty at the time and should have been catching up with paperwork in his office. Several police officers later gave evidence that they had looked in on Lewis during these hours, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Yet, despite all Stuart Lewis’ wrongdoing, his flagrant disregard for police regulations and protocols, the unconscionable delay in commencing the biggest murder hunt in the history of Wales, which could be laid squarely at his feet, Lewis was never brought to book or faced disciplinary sanctions. He was not demoted as a result of his conduct and continued to work until his retirement from the force.

And if all this might be considered bad enough news for a police force struggling to repair its tattered reputation in the wake of so many miscarriages of justice, worse would follow. As the boiling anger of Detective Superintendent Martyn Lloyd-Evans and his team increased with each new revelation of wrongdoing within the force, it now turned to acute embarrassment as another shock development came to light.

Stuart Lewis has two brothers: Chris, who is younger, and Stephen, his identical twin brother. Stephen was a serving police officer, a sergeant in South Wales Police based in Neath, at the time of the murders. At 9 a.m. on Sunday morning after the fire, Stephen Lewis and his wife Alison – a former police officer – turned up at 9 Kelvin Road, which now was a cordoned-off crime scene. Barriers had been erected at either end of the road, preventing all traffic except official vehicles from entering the hitherto quiet residential street.

The couple confirmed the identity of the victims with officers at the scene, and then Alison Lewis seemed to become extremely distressed. The reason why soon became clear. As the police investigation progressed, it was revealed that she had been having an affair with one of the victims, Mandy Power.

Quickly departing the murder scene, Alison and Stephen Lewis returned to their home at 8 West Crossways in Pontardawe, where she collapsed in paroxysms of grief. Also present in her home at this time were Neath solicitor Joanne Anthony, Anthony’s daughter Victoria, and Kimberley Wilson, a friend of Alison Lewis. Joanne Anthony later described how, inconsolable in her apparent grief, Lewis held out her hands while tears streamed down her face as she called out to her erstwhile lover. Victoria would later describe Lewis as being ‘in a very distressed state’.

Saying that she could not go on living without Mandy, Alison went upstairs to a bedroom. Her husband Stephen and Joanne Anthony followed her and then restrained her from jumping out of a first-floor window.

On 7 July, ten days after the murders, Alison Lewis booked herself into Cefn Coed psychiatric hospital in Swansea, where she stayed for 14 days. While she was there, she was kept on a 24-hour suicide watch. Two police officers stood guard outside her room. During this time detectives investigating the murders could not question her unless her doctors agreed that she was sufficiently mentally competent to understand the nature of the questioning. Alison Lewis failed to cooperate with medical staff and refused to leave her room while the officers were on guard, even when she was expected to attend a fire drill. No statement could legally be obtained from her at this time, although she voluntarily provided samples of her saliva for DNA testing.

Alison Lewis’ husband also knew Mandy Power. Sergeant Stephen Lewis had met her at their home in Pontardawe when she visited on two or three occasions. In fact, on Friday 25 June, little more than 24 hours before the murders, Mandy Power had joined the Lewis family and their twin four-year-old daughters, Catrin and Rhiannon, for a barbeque. Mandy’s own children, Katie and Emily, had stayed with their father that night on an access visit at his home in Pontardawe.

On the day that Alison Lewis was admitted to Cefn Coed Hospital, a South Wales Police spokesperson confirmed that Stephen Lewis had temporarily flown to Germany with his daughters, ‘to avoid the adverse publicity’ that was gathering in the lower Swansea Valley.

By this point it had become known that a senior South Wales Police officer and his ex-police officer wife had been intimately involved with one of the murder victims, and another related police officer had inexplicably abandoned the crime scene. So it might have been prudent for Sir Anthony Burden, Chief Constable of South Wales Police, to have handed the investigation over to another police force. Such a transfer of responsibility would have removed any suspicion that South Wales Police might, yet again, be seeking to look after their own. It would also eliminate any temptation by fellow officers to leak to their colleagues’ sensitive information that might hinder the investigation and prejudice its outcome.

And, although its significance would not become known until later, there was another reason why the investigation should have been handed over to another police force. Alison Lewis, her husband Stephen and brother-in-law Stuart knew a number of police officers in the South Wales Police both as work colleagues and friends. Many of these officers were working on the murder investigation. Thus, as the Lewis’ involvement with one of the victims became known, their connection to colleagues involved in the case would throw further suspicion on the force as one unable in this instance to act with disinterest and integrity.

There was yet another issue which should have increased pressure on the Chief Constable to consider whether his force should continue investigating the murders, and this would have come to light at the time if the investigating police officer had not been silent on the matter. Alison Lewis knew Martyn Lloyd-Evans well: they had worked together at Llanishen police station in Cardiff several years previously. But this extraordinary disclosure would not become public knowledge until Alison Lewis revealed the association in an HTV Wales interview many months later.

Remarkably, South Wales Police and Sir Anthony Burden retained responsibility for the conduct of the case, even though officers in the force would inevitably find themselves investigating their colleagues. The lessons of recent history unlearned, this decision meant that, in a time-honoured tradition, police officers were able to watch out for one another. Confidential information crucial to the investigation could be passed on by detectives involved in the case to their fellow officers Stephen and Stuart Lewis, who were not entitled to receive it. In the event, this is exactly what the Lewises later claimed did happen.

Stuart Lewis’ early-morning disappearance from Swansea Police Station, and his incomprehensible act of abandoning the crime scene, Alison Lewis’ sexual relationship with one of the victims, and other incriminating evidence that soon came to light, which prima facie implicated the Lewises in the crime, was more than sufficient for them to be arrested and brought in for questioning. Yet, astonishingly, Detective Superintendent Lloyd-Evans did not take this seemingly obvious step. That moment was unaccountably delayed for more than a year. On 4 July 2000, in a series of three dawn raids, Alison Lewis and her husband Stephen were arrested on suspicion of murder, while Stuart Lewis, Stephen’s identical twin brother, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

But despite the substantial weight of evidence against them, it was not the Lewises who would stand in the dock for the Clydach murders. That unfortunate position would be occupied by someone else altogether, a man who would be convicted of the killings on the strength of a single piece of evidence, lies and his lack of a solid alibi. It was David George (Dai) Morris, a builder’s labourer with a police record for robbery and violence, who swore on his children’s lives that he had had nothing to do with the crimes.

Chapter 4

As the media circus and restless crowds waiting outside 9 Kelvin Road on the morning of the murders grew larger, the fire-gutted house was taped off before being filmed, photographed, catalogued and forensically examined in minute detail. The investigation and the search for evidence in and around the house took almost three weeks to complete. It would turn out to be the longest crime scene investigation ever carried out in Wales.

A routine police video was taken of the crime scene. Apart from a brief introduction, it was a silent movie. Every harrowing detail left in the aftermath of the crime was preserved in a 40-minute film. Nothing was omitted for fear of missing some vital clue, and out of respect for the victims, all of whom displayed the most appalling injuries. The video would play a key part in the two trials that would follow.

Claire Galbraith, a forensic scientist, was one of the first experts to enter the burned-out house on Sunday morning as the hunt for evidence and the murder weapon began. Also on the investigative team were forensic scientists Robert Bell and Dr Michael Barber, who was a footmark and fingerprint specialist; Michael Appleby, an expert in DNA analysis, and scene of crimes investigators Gerald Williams, David White and John Rees. Two Home Office pathologists were present: Dr Deryk James, who would later conduct the postmortem examinations, and Dr Peter Vanezis, who had practiced forensic pathology for more than twenty years. Other forensic scientists would be drafted in later, each a specialist in their own field. One of these was Dr Jonathan Whittacker, a leading expert in DNA profiling.

Detective Superintendent Martyn Lloyd-Evans made an announcement to reporters at Cockett Police Station, telling them ‘the inquiry is still in its infancy’. Speaking of the manner in which the victims were killed, he said: ‘We believe all members of the family were struck with a heavy object – some sort of implement perhaps.’

Interest among the waiting crowds intensified as detectives continued the investigation and questioned neighbours. They watched as drain covers in the street were lifted off, manholes were searched and probed with torches as police hunted for the murder weapon and any evidence connected with the crime.

All this activity took place under the gaze of UK national television cameras, a battery of radio microphones and a gaggle of newspaper reporters, some local, others from farther afield. News of the murders quickly spread and an anxious public wanted to know all the details. Journalists mingled with neighbours in Kelvin Road, gathering whatever newsworthy items they could.

One reporter discovered that it was not the first time 9 Kelvin Road had provided the stage for human tragedy. Forty-five years earlier, in 1953, a previous owner of the house had accidentally shot himself dead while trying to kill a rat in the garden. Shocked neighbour Shirley Macmillan described Mandy to milling reporters as ‘a pretty girl with very friendly children’. She said: ‘She was a devoted mum – always with her kids. We are all devastated.’

Local councillor Sylvia Lewis, who knew both Michael Power, Mandy’s ex-husband, and her bedridden mother, Doris Dawson, spoke aloud the words everyone else was thinking: ‘This is terrible, terrible, terrible. There seems to be no motive.’ She explained that widowed Doris Dawson had ‘suffered a brain haemorrhage several years earlier and was in poor health. Even so, she always put a brave face on things, and was well liked.’

At about noon on the day of the murders, a young witness, Nicola Williams, from Sunnybank in Clydach, appeared at the crime scene. She told detectives that on the previous evening she and a female friend had driven up to Cardiff for a night out. They returned early in the morning, arriving back in Clydach at around 2.20 a.m. At this time there was just a slight drizzle. Ms Williams dropped off her friend in Vardre Road and continued driving home alone. When she turned right off the main Lone Road into Gellionnen Road, she saw a man ahead of her walking quickly up the hill towards the junction with Kelvin Road. As she drew closer to him, she decreased her speed to a crawl and lowered her window. When they were level with one another, she looked directly at the man to see if he was someone from the village whom she knew. At the time, he was passing under a streetlight and he turned to face her, so she saw him clearly. But she did not recognise him and so drove on home without thinking any more about it.

Later that morning, when Nicola Williams heard about the murders, she remembered the man, realised her sighting might be important, and left for Kelvin Road immediately to pass on her information. She described him as being in his thirties, six feet tall or a little more. He was wearing dark jeans or trousers and a shiny bomber jacket which she said ‘looked like something police wear’, and he was carrying a bag under his arm.